FAQ
Frequently more questions than answers…
Find below our attempts to clarify the thinking behind the thinking that underpins _this breath is not mine to keep. We don’t claim to have answers, we find more and more questions… We want the work to mirror the complexity of the world we live in, so we are keen to offer some hints on our process and what we’ve learned so far. This is not a glossary, we don’t want to try to explain everything – and it is all debatable. We’d rather you let us know your own questions and answers. Contact us here.
Q: Why are you exploring how supremacy thinking?
A: Globally we are witnessing the extinction of our world, and yet we continue to fuel our demise, so we are interested to create work that support us to notice our involvement or complicity, disrupt the stasis or stuckness in privilege and ignorance, and rewrite the rules that colonize our minds and keep inequality entrenched.
Q: Why notice, disrupt and reframe? What’s with the repetitions of three?
A: When we worked on Creating Together - what can possibly go wrong?, flowing on from Jen’s Australia Council for The Arts Fellowship, we developed a dynamic model of provocations to scrutinize harm in the context of power and privilege in Community Arts and Cultural Development. Dynamic, because life is chaotic with a somewhat cyclic pattern, it seems to repeat in stages: We never stop to learn, to be curious and to change. Attempts to straighten cyclic processes into linear thinking feel like a death wish, a cult of fake simplicity, easy but false answers, self-important, authoritarian and cowardly. Life is complex. Our notice–disrupt–reframe model has become a nice device to remind us to be mindful: What do we notice? Where are we stuck? How do we disrupt stuckness? How can we change our view point? What don’t we see? As a result, we created a set of 50 satirically archetypal character cards based on this model, with hundreds of questions, called What Privilege?, which in turn led to us to investigate everyday supremacy thinking.
Q: What do you mean by supremacy thinking?
A: We coined supremacy thinking to play with common, daily used yet often hidden, powerful mindsets that enable people to assume that they have achieved a state or condition of being superior than others, in authority, power and status. Such self-serving power of influence is reinforced and justified through ideas, norms and actions, that over time form shared cultural mythologies. These myths are systems of belief, powerful stories that underpin how we think and feel, how we create and judge value. They influence the very fabric of our thoughts and actions, regardless if we are aware of these narrative processes or not. We framed supremacy thinking as an absurdly dialectic set of rules, digging deeper into our work on power and privilege, in the hope that these tools may unearth some of the deeply embedded stories that form the blood-soaked ground of westernised, colonial culture.
Q: What do you mean by power?
A: We define power as the social power of influence over others, that always exists between people. Power never leaves a vacuum, there is no powerless utopia. It is always being negotiated, with or without us present: The question is who is taking part in the negotiation, what are the rules and how can they be changed? How do we access power, use and share it? Do we use it to achieve order with or without oppression?
Power affects our moral values and is affected by them, we attach violence to our values, sanctions, threats in case of non-compliance. Power manifesting in traditional institutions such as State or Family, claim to protect our values through an enforced yet fictitious monopoly of violence or a set of rules, customs, mythologies and beliefs. Such bargains for protection of our values hang in the balance of their legitimacy, agreed purpose and proportionality, and are constantly undermined by the reality of corruption. This nice legitimacy in turn is derived from a complex, idealistic process of representation, care and belonging, that theoretically could work well, but throughout history has been corroded by the non-transparent influence of privilege and its ignorance.
Q: What do you mean by privilege? What is the connection?
A: Privilege asserts the right to exclude and include on its own terms. The first rule of privilege is to not talk about privilege. It can exclude itself from scrutiny, wielding the power of influence over democratic norms, accountability and sanctions. And it can allow pesky climbers to enter. Revolutions are full of middleclass men demanding access to privilege and get it granted under duress until they too become privileged.
Privilege thrives on complexity. The privileged target our shared beliefs, values and stories we use to make sense of the world, focusing on the commodification of everything, myth-making, alt-fact propaganda, exclusion, fear mongering and threats of violence.
Currently we are reaching critical mass in the understanding that change is inevitable on a heating planet on evidence of already escalating crises, but the question is, will this change be progressive, equitable justice or change of increased inequality of climate apartheid?
For us, power and privilege exist in the context of a wicked, interconnected mess of intersectional violence, let’s name but a few: Dwindling resources, racism, segregation, unemployment and job insecurity, conflicting cultural beliefs, sexism, abuse and violence against women and children, attacks on gender fluidity, ableism, mass psychosis and wholesale medication, destruction of public services and commons under the guise of fiscal prudence and austerity, increase of cancer and epidemics, protection of corporate interests over social wellbeing, easing restrictions on flow of money/ profits, tax avoidance, systemic inequality, false techno-solutions, robotic AI, post humanity thinking, climate chaos, mass movement of people, rising fascism and populist authoritarianism fanned by unaccountable, transnational social media companies, religious extremism, jingoistic nationalism, borders, law & order, war mongering, chemical load, habitat loss, food, water and shelter shortages, crop failure, starvation and extinction - in some shape or form all this and more is happening or headed our way. For many this cataclysmic process has already arrived, just unevenly distributed, to paraphrase William Gibson. No kidding.
Q: Ouch. So how can understanding what supremacy thinking is and how it works, make a difference? What has this got to do with art?
A: This work is about critical literacy: Our ability to notice, disrupt and reframe power and privilege and to use art to explore urgently needed alternatives. We use a dialectic, critical literacy as our tool kit, a lens of power and privilege and its oppressive harmful impact, set against values and actions of solidarity. For us everyday supremacy thinking does not just apply to our garden-variety racist sexist homophobe neonazis and their conservative enablers, it is our attempt to describe a complicit, often silent routine understanding of how privilege serves the interests of the privileged and nothing else, while mis-using arts and culture to promise everyone a near impossible chance to climb a competitive ladder to join their club. There is no unpolitical art, no fence to sit on.
We are all partisan in a culture war, if we like it or not – and we don’t like war metaphors and rather would play with whimsical cartoons and self-indulgent sculptures. And that’s what we are doing… but there’s a war going on in all of our heads and on our screens, fought with memes, slogans and symbols, microtargeting billions of minds right now. We can’t turn it off. Oh but we can? At the time of writing, it has gone beyond that, grown from nauseating envy-trending and gaslighting to election rigging, genocide-supporting and fear mongering on a scale never seen before. Depending on our level of privilege, we can still hide or filter some of the more oppressive bullshit, but the noise of the commodification of everything is inescapable. For a lot of people, a company like facebook IS the internet and seen as a reliable source of information. Google is how we find stuff, but it is a for-profit data harvesting machine that tracks every move we make online. Even our absence is measurable.
Privilege thrives on ignorance, it doesn’t need to reflect on itself other than to improve its hold on power. Social power abhors scrutiny and transparency, it is a normative force that uses tension between ‘positive’ societal values and their attached violence, based on the assumption that once we believe that scarcity and manufactured lack will not allow enough for all needs to be met, we will come around to their social-darwinist myth of bio-determined self-interest as evolutionary progress. It is an assumption that harnesses fear and requires competition and exclusion, trapping the less privileged in negative feedback loops of limiting choices reinforced over generations. It is a performative tension we are not meant to ease, its drama is meant to enthral, it is a theatre that we are not to leave mid show lest we upset the status quo, offend the powerful and risk our shares in privilege.
We understand supremacy thinking as a non-linear step-by-step process, it loops and jumps through sets of rules and beliefs. You can’t pin it down as an easily recognisable moral deficiency. It is as seductive as it is elusive, as everyone wants some level of control over their lives. Everyone can claim coercive power over others to gain a certain amount of privilege, over other classes, cultures, genders, adults, abilities, children, animals, plants, resources etc. Regardless of the form and strategic arm of the oppression, its processes take a fluid, networked approach to domination, an interdependent system honed over thousands of years. The catch is that its routines are not monolithic, but have gaps, cracks, uncertainties in which we can leverage our questions. Such is the counter power of critical literacy and political art, that its curious questions of playfulness, justice, transparency and morality can result in system change. Everything is political. Nothing is safe…But oblivion looms large, when we cannot remember, when we loose empathy and hand over our critical faculties to non-transparent and unaccountable elites and their machines trained by the rules of supremacy. It is a vicious cycle, a mesmerising feedback loop we are keen to twist open with our silly games.
It is this sticky fluidity of supremacy thinking that makes it very addictive for people. It is easier, more convenient and comforting to agree to abide by hierarchies with a simple chain of command, neat if arbitrary set of rules and direct flow of violence and shiny benefits, than to negotiate complex values equitably, as diverse and ever-changing equals stuck on a messy and overheating planet run by a bunch of delusional extractivists.
Yet what can we do? We are the frogs agreeing to be boiled by degrees. So comfy.
Q: Why grief?
A: Globally we are in distress. Mental health is declining everywhere, people are upset, voting for leaders who are abandoning or simply stealing from them. The Scientific Doomsday clock is set at two minutes to midnight. We are scared and stuck without a new, hegemonial ideology to guide us. Grieving seems to us a necessary process to access all of our emotions, let go of our delusions of simple fixes and reclaim our imagination and joy of life, so we can face the complex, shared tasks of rebuilding solidarity. And to have some fun amongst all the cruelty. Living in this Greek tragedy, we’d rather go to a raucous Greek funeral, not the anglo-puritan version we seem stuck in.
Q: How will you do this?
A: With you… you can engage with our work in many way – it combines our experiments for_this breath with our work on The Colony in 10 community multi-arts installations, as part of a whimsical arts trail connecting 4 public galleries in South Australia Sep 2020 – Jan 2021, alongside print and online publications that explore global chaos, grief and the existential joy of life.
Q: What is the Colony?
A: _this breath is set in a fictitious NOW, under CRISIS-∞ restrictions, issued by The Colony, a surreal bureaucracy, that has colonized our world and repurposed the project’s website to broadcast public compliance messages, 10 easy steps to supremacy and handy bunker rulz to make the best of the eternal lock down.
The Colony is a ruse we have created to be able to talk about power and privilege from the safety of our couch and to have something to push back against. Join the resistance: Notice your compliance. Disrupt our status quo. Rewrite the rules.
Q: What impact are you aiming for with this work?
A: Our mission - and yours if you dare to accept - is to question, challenge and resist The Colony’s supremacy thinking through your artistic collaboration. How you respond is up to you, but we are asking all collaborators to delve deep into _this breath’ 10 supremacy and grief scenarios to explore what resonates, so we can share keys to global solidarity and climate justice. It is a collaborative process, we want you to have fun with it and come and play with us: _this breath is not mine to keep, make it yours, but can you keep it…?